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Shaping Tea Party Passion Into Campaign Force


Brendan Steinhauser, a director for FreedomWorks, led a training seminar in Philadelphia in July.
Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times


Attendees at a FreedomWorks training seminar studied congressional district maps.
Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times

VIDEO
Can the Tea Party Be Organized?
The advocacy group Freedomworks and its chief organizer, Brendan Steinhauser, have moved aggressively to mold the Tea Party movement into a political force.
http://video.nytimes.com/video/2010/08/25/us/politics/1248068915781/can-the-tea-party-be-organized.html [embedded]

By KATE ZERNIKE
Published: August 25, 2010

WASHINGTON — On a Saturday in August when most of the political class has escaped this city’s swelter, 50 Tea Party leaders have flown in from across the country to jam into a conference room in an office building on Pennsylvania Avenue, apparently unconcerned that the fancy address does not guarantee air-conditioning on weekends. They have come to learn how to take over the country, voter by voter.

Look for houses with flags, they are instructed; their residents tend to be patriotic conservatives. Marine flags or religious symbols, ditto. Take doggie treats with you as you canvass neighborhoods — “Now they are your best friend; it’s dog person to dog person.” Don’t just hand out yard signs and bumper stickers for your candidate — offer to plant them on the lawn or paste them on the bumper (front driver’s side works best.) Follow up with thank you notes, the handwritten kind. Be polite, and don’t take rejection personally: “Remember, it’s for freedom!”

This is a three-day “boot camp” at FreedomWorks [ http://www.freedomworks.org/ ], the Washington advocacy group that has done more than any other organization to build the Tea Party movement. For 18 months, the group’s young staff has been conducting training sessions like this one across the country, in hotel conference rooms or basements of bars, shaping the inchoate anger of the Tea Party with its libertarian ideology and leftist organizing tactics.

The goal is to turn local Tea Party groups into a standing get-out-the-vote operation in Congressional districts across the country. Sarah Palin made community organizing a term of derision during the 2008 presidential campaign; FreedomWorks has made Tea Party conservatives the surprise community organizing force of the 2010 midterm elections, showing on-the-ground strength in races like the Republican primary for the Senate in Alaska on Tuesday, where the upstart Joe Miller was leading [ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/us/politics/26primaries.html ] Senator Lisa Murkowski in a race that may take weeks to call.

“This movement, if we can turn out hundreds or thousands to the streets to protest and wave signs and yell and make an impact on public policy debate, then we can make a lot of difference,” Brendan Steinhauser [ http://www.freedomworks.org/brendan-steinhauser-biography ], FreedomWorks’s chief organizer for the Tea Party groups, told the leaders gathered here. “But if those same people go and walk neighborhoods and do all the things we’re talking about, put up the door-hangers in the final 72 hours and make the phone calls, we may crush some of these guys.”

In recent months, FreedomWorks has teamed up with Glenn Beck, the biggest celebrity of the Tea Party movement to promote it. This weekend, with many Tea Party supporters descending on Washington for a rally that Mr. Beck is holding at the Lincoln Memorial [(items linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=53689101 and following and http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=53761410 and following], FreedomWorks is staging a convention where Tea Party candidates will address 1,600 activists.

Through its political action committee, FreedomWorks plans to spend $10 million on the midterm elections, on campaign paraphernalia — signs for candidates like Rand Paul of Kentucky and Marco Rubio of Florida are stacked around the offices here — voter lists, and a phone system that allows volunteers to make calls for candidates around the country from their home computers. With “microfinancing” grants, it will steer money from FreedomWorks donors — the tax code protects their anonymity — to local Tea Parties.

Other groups will spend more. On the left, a coalition of unions plans to spend at least $88 million; on the right, Americans for Prosperity [ http://americansforprosperity.org/national-site ] will spend $45 million.

But FreedomWorks’s pitch to activists is that the money is not really the point. It is about convincing friends, neighbors and strangers in Congressional districts where 100 or 1,000 votes can make all the difference. The activists tend to be a zealous lot to start with; FreedomWorks urges them to channel that energy by becoming precinct captains, knocking on doors and learning from the way that Barack Obama — not someone Tea Party supporters generally admire — wrapped up the Democratic nomination for president by organizing the caucus states.

FreedomWorks was founded in 1984 as Citizens for a Sound Economy, which was financed by the Koch Foundation, the underwriter for many libertarian causes. In 2003, it hired as its chairman Dick Armey, the former Texas congressman and House majority leader who was a force behind the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress.

While Mr. Armey serves as a kind of ambassador for FreedomWorks, the day-to-day task of organizing Tea Party groups has gone to a staff of about 20 hard-charging conservatives in their 20s and 30s — a striking contrast to a movement that is made up largely of people twice their age and more. Tea Party leaders at the boot camp gasped when Mr. Steinhauser emphasized the importance of going after so-called Reagan Democrats and then noted that he himself was not born until 1981, after Ronald Reagan’s first inauguration.

Staff members like to say that they model FreedomWorks on the Grateful Dead or Virgin Atlantic Airways: they want to build a like-minded community, an endeavor that is as much fun as work.

But they are also deeply ideological; a portrait of Ayn Rand hangs on the office walls along with one of Jerry Garcia. FreedomWorks was founded to promote the theories of the Austrian economic school, which argues that economic models are useless because they cannot account for all the variables of human behavior, and that markets must be unfettered to succeed.

New employees receive a required-reading list that includes “Rules for Radicals [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/weekinreview/23alinsky.html (below)],” by Saul Alinsky, the father of modern community organizing, and “A Force More Powerful [ http://www.aforcemorepowerful.org/ ],” about 20th-century social movements, as well as Frédéric Bastiat’s “The Law,” which argues that governments are essentially stealing when they tax their citizens to spend on welfare, infrastructure or public education. FreedomWorks urges Tea Party groups to read the same works. (“It’s better than ‘Going Rogue,’ ” said Mr. Steinhauser, referring to Ms. Palin’s memoir.)

While other conservative groups have tried to mobilize the Tea Party energy, FreedomWorks moved first, and most aggressively. Hours after Rick Santelli [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/business/media/03cnbc.html ] called for “a Chicago tea party” in a widely viewed rant on CNBC [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/23/business/media/23cnbc.html ] in February 2009, it put up a Web site with tips on how to hold a tea party, then a Google map of events. As more people found the map on Web searches, they e-mailed FreedomWorks information on their own events, ultimately allowing Mr. Steinhauser to compile a list of thousands of Tea Party contacts across the country.

That list allowed the group to mobilize volunteers to Massachusetts in January to campaign for Scott P. Brown, who won the United States Senate seat that had been occupied by Edward M. Kennedy for nearly 50 years, and to Utah to elect Mike Lee as the Republican nominee [ http://elections.nytimes.com/2010/senate/utah ] for Senate after Tea Party groups deposed the three-term incumbent Robert F. Bennett [ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/us/politics/09utah.html (and see {item linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=51859733 )]. About 180,000 people voted in the primary that Mr. Lee won; FreedomWorks says 30,000 had received a phone call or a visit from its volunteers.

Its candidates are libertarians and economic conservatives, but in the 2010 midterm elections, FreedomWorks is urging Tea Party groups to work for any Republican, on the theory that a compromised Republican is better than Democratic control of Congress.

Mr. Steinhauser has traveled to 42 states to train local groups or meet with leaders in races where FreedomWorks hopes to make a difference. But the Tea Parties like to think of themselves as leaderless organizations, and are suspicious of attempts to co-opt their energy.

In a swing through New England last month, he met with activists eager to defeat Charlie Bass, a former Republican congressman from New Hampshire who is running again in the Sept. 14 primary. But they did not want to endorse either of the Tea Party candidates because they feared their membership would resent anything that looked like top-down control. “You have to endorse,” Mr. Steinhauser told them. “If you don’t, the bad guys will.” Each group should endorse separately, he advised, so that the local news media would write a new story each time.

Still, the activists were eager for outside advice.

“If you give us the education, we’ll do the work,” Robert Horr, the chairman of the Cumberland County Tea Party, in Maine, told him. “Just aim us.”

Mr. Steinhauser encouraged the Maine activists to start getting behind candidates to challenge Senator Olympia J. Snowe, a Republican up for re-election in 2012.

FreedomWorks is focused particularly on midterm races in Florida, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania. For the boot camp in Washington, it had flown in representatives from those states.

Nan Swift, FreedomWorks’s campaign manager, encouraged them to stage dramatic events to call attention to their candidates — “Everyone already thinks we’re crazy, embrace it!” — and to sign up for their opponents’ e-mails, then go to their events and swamp them with signs.

Mr. Steinhauser urged them not to waste their energy on districts so deeply Democratic that they cannot be won.

Still, he did not cut off any opportunity; after all, he noted, no one thought Scott Brown could win. “This year, if there’s one message you can take away,” he said, “it’s that nothing is impossible for us.”

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/us/politics/26freedom.html


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Know Thine Enemy
Word for Word | Saul Alinsky




ORGANIZER Saul Alinsky’s rules stand the test of time.
George Tames/The New York Times

By NOAM COHEN
Published: August 22, 2009

Saul Alinsky, the Chicago activist and writer whose street-smart tactics influenced generations of community organizers, most famously the current president, could not have been more clear about which side he was on. In his 1971 text, “Rules for Radicals,” Mr. Alinsky, who died in 1972, explains his purpose: “What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. ‘The Prince’ was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. ‘Rules for Radicals’ is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”

It is an irony of the current skirmishing about health care that those who could be considered Mr. Alinsky’s sworn enemies — the groups, many industry sponsored, who are trying to shout down Congressional town hall meetings — have taken a page (chapters, really) from his handbook on community organizing. In an article in The Financial Times last week, Dick Armey, the former Republican House majority leader, now an organizer against the Democrats’ proposals on health care, offered his opinion: “What I think of Alinsky is that he was very good at what he did but what he did was not good.”

The disruption of the town hall meetings has many Alinsky trademarks: using spectacle to make up for lack of numbers; targeting an individual to make a large point; and trying to use ridicule to persuade the undecided. Here are excerpts from “Rules for Radicals.”

Mr. Alinsky observes that “any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical”:

One of our greatest revolutionary heroes was Francis Marion of South Carolina, who became immortalized in American history as “the Swamp Fox.” Marion was an outright revolutionary guerrilla. ...Cornwallis and the regular British Army found their plans and operations harried and disorganized by Marion’s guerrilla tactics. Infuriated by the effectiveness of his operations, and incapable of coping with them, the British denounced him as a criminal and charged that he did not engage in warfare “like a gentleman” or “a Christian.”

Don’t worry, Mr. Alinsky advised, if they call you names:

The job of the organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a “dangerous enemy.” ... Here again we find that it is power and fear that are essential to the development of faith. This need is met by the establishment’s use of the brand “dangerous,” for in that one word the establishment reveals its fear of the organizer, its fear that he represents a threat to its omnipotence. Now the organizer has his “birth certificate” and can begin.

The first step:

The organizer dedicated to changing the life of a particular community must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression. He must search out controversy and issues, rather than avoid them, for unless there is controversy people are not concerned enough to act.

Being on TV can be empowering:

A man is living in a slum tenement. He doesn’t know anybody and nobody knows him. He doesn’t care for anyone because no one cares for him. ...When the organizer approaches him part of what begins to be communicated is that through the organization and its power he will get his birth certificate for life, that he will become known, that things will change from the drabness of a life where all that changes is the calendar. This same man, in a demonstration at City Hall, might find himself confronting the mayor and saying, “Mr. Mayor, we have had it up to here and we are not going to take it any more.” Television cameramen put their microphones in front of him and ask, “What is your name, sir?” “John Smith.” Nobody ever asked him what his name was before. ... Suddenly he’s alive!

Make yourself look as big and scary as possible:

For an elementary illustration of tactics, take parts of your face as the point of reference; your eyes, your ears, and your nose. First the eyes; if you have organized a vast, mass-based people’s organization, you can parade it visibly before the enemy and openly show your power. Second the ears; if your organization is small in numbers, then do what Gideon did: conceal the members in the dark but raise a din and clamor that will make the listener believe that your organization numbers many more than it does. Third, the nose; if your organization is too tiny even for noise, stink up the place.

Find a single person to focus your energies on:

It should be borne in mind that the target is always trying to shift responsibility to get out of being the target. There is a constant squirming and moving and strategy — purposeful, and malicious at times, other times just for straight self-survival — on the part of the designated target. The forces of change must keep this in mind and pin that target down securely.

In one of his sharpest passages, Mr. Alinsky tells his readers, living in their “radicalized dream world,” not to ignore the lower-middle class:

They are a fearful people, who feel threatened from all sides: the nightmare of pending retirement and old age with a Social Security decimated by inflation; the shadow of unemployment from a slumping economy, with blacks, already fearsome because the cultures conflict, threatening job competition; the high cost of long-term illness; and finally with mortgages outstanding, they dread the possibility of property devaluation from non-whites moving into the neighborhood. ...Remember that even if you cannot win over the lower middle-class, at least parts of them must be persuaded to where there is at least communication, then to a series of partial agreements and a willingness to abstain from hard opposition as changes takes place.

His final rule is that there is no handbook for life:

I hesitate to spell out specific applications of these tactics. I remember an unfortunate experience with my “Reveille for Radicals,” in which I collected accounts of particular actions and tactics employed in organizing a number of communities. For some time after the book was published I got reports that would-be organizers were using this book as a manual, and whenever they were confronted with a puzzling situation they would retreat into some vestibule or alley and thumb through to find the answer!

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/weekinreview/23alinsky.html


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also e.g. (items linked in):

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=44361331 and following, and http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=2765155 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=46887888

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=34549650 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=53748521

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=53779548

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=48059005 and preceding and following, and http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=48558384 and preceding